Skip Navigation


Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on October 20, 2006
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2006 1(3):214-220; doi:10.1093/scan/nsl026
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
1/3/214    most recent
nsl026v1
Right arrow E-letters: Submit a response
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me when E-letters are posted
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Request Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Hauser, M. D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Hauser, M. D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The liver and the moral organ

Marc D. Hauser

Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Human Evolutionary Biology Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

Drawing on an analogy to language, I argue that a suite of novel questions emerge when we consider our moral faculty in a similar light. In particular, I suggest the possibility that our moral judgments are derived from unconscious, intuitive processes that operate over the causal-intentional structure of actions and their consequences. On this model, we are endowed with a moral faculty that generates judgments about permissible and forbidden actions prior to the involvement of our emotions and systems of conscious, rational deliberation. This framing of the problem sets up specific predictions about the role of particular neural structures and psychological processes in the generation of moral judgments as well as in the generation of moral behavior. I sketch the details of these predictions and point to relevant data that speak to the validity of thinking of our moral intuitions as grounded in a moral organ.

Keywords: moral oragan; linguistic analogy; moral judgments; cognitive faculties

Correspondence should be addressed to Marc D. Hauser, Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Human Evolutionary Biology Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: mdh{at}wjh.harvard.edu.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Soc Cogn Affect NeurosciHome page
K. Prehn, I. Wartenburger, K. Meriau, C. Scheibe, O. R. Goodenough, A. Villringer, E. van der Meer, and H. R. Heekeren
Individual differences in moral judgment competence influence neural correlates of socio-normative judgments
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci, March 1, 2008; 3(1): 33 - 46.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.